The present invention relates to electronic data networks and more particularly to minimising network resource overhead.
Electronic data networks are often thought of in terms of interconnected nodes, amongst which data may be exchanged. In current art, a local time maintained at a node within a network architecture is synchronized with a reference time. Bursts of synchronization messages containing reference time stamps are transmitted over a network or communication link according to a predetermined protocol. Also in current art, an agent for replicating data stored in source database tables in a database management system is implemented by a server at a remote client implemented on a client computer based on a client defined replication period. Further, in other art mechanism are provided for asynchronous store and forward data replication. Such mechanisms utilize one-way, unacknowledged communication messages between systems in a computer network to transfer locally modified data to other systems having a copy of the data. FIG. 1 shows an agent reporting system as known in the prior art. As shown in FIG. 1, n Agents A3 (131) to A3n (132) are distributed amongst a number of clients. These agents monitor activity on these clients and regularly report to a root node 105.